The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS

by Robert Spencer

  Yet this great jihad was never even to get past Khartoum. In June 1885, the Mahdi died suddenly and mysteriously. Although he continued to be a revered figure, after his death his movement was a spent force, unable to continue without his charismatic leadership. The principal lesson of the Mahdi revolt that like-minded Muslims carried into the twentieth century was that the Ottomans, Egyptians, and British could not defeat a determined group of pious, believing Muslims. The Ottoman Empire was truly, as it was often called, “the Sick Man of Europe,” and its end was nigh, but the British Empire was at its zenith and had not been able to defeat the Mahdi.

  So while there were currents within the decaying Ottoman Empire that were beginning to conclude that the empire’s problems stemmed from its adherence to Islam, numerous Muslims elsewhere were concluding that the Ottomans’ trouble was that they weren’t Islamic enough, and that all that one needed for success against even the great powers of the world was a fanatical adherence to the will of Allah.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea that success came from obeying the will of Allah was decidedly in eclipse. The British had won control of India and Egypt, ending one long-lived Islamic empire (that of the Mughals) and contributing to the near-demise of another (the Ottomans), even while entering into alliances of convenience with it. As the twentieth century dawned, it looked as if, aside from a few fanatics such as the Mahdi, the era of jihad had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

  CHAPTER NINE

  RESURGENCE

  Jihad in the Twentieth Century

  I. THE END OF THE CALIPHATE

  The Age of Defensive Jihad

  The Ottoman Empire was in its death throes as the twentieth century began, and the days of Islamic states’ declaring jihad against non-Muslim neighbors were drawing to a close. Sunni law authorized the caliph to declare only offensive jihad, and the caliph was weak and getting weaker. But that is not the only form of jihad warfare against infidels: Islamic law stipulates that when a Muslim land is attacked, defensive jihad becomes obligatory for every individual Muslim. The Islamic legal manual Reliance of the Traveller stipulates that “the caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians…until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”1 However, “when non-Muslims invade a Muslim country or near to one,” jihad “becomes personally obligatory upon the inhabitants of that country, who must repel the non-Muslims with whatever they can.”2

  This applies not just to the Muslims in that country but to all Muslims. Ibn Taymiyya considered it an absolute: “If the enemy wants to attack the Muslims, then repelling him becomes a duty for all those under attack and for the others in order to help them. God, He is exalted, has said: ‘Yet if they ask you for help, for religion’s sake, it is your duty to help them.’ (K[oran] 8:72) In the same vein the Prophet has ordered Muslims to help fellow Muslims. The assistance, which is obligatory both for the regular professional army and for others, must be given, according to everybody’s possibilities, either in person, by fighting on foot or on horseback, or through financial contributions, be they small or large.”3

  The twentieth century was the age of defensive jihad. Because of the universal character of this responsibility and the absence, after 1924, of a caliph, the twentieth century saw, for the first time on a large scale, individuals and small groups mounting jihad attacks in service of the larger jihad agenda, not as part of an Islamic army.

  Jihad Against Colonial Rule

  In October 1911, an Italian army invaded Libya and confronted a vastly smaller Ottoman force there. The Italians encountered far greater resistance than they expected, however, because the Ottomans got help from a revivalist Muslim group known as the Sanusis, after its founder, Muhammad ibn Ali as-Sanusi. Its leader, al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif, declared jihad against the Italians in January 1912, calling upon “all Moslems especially those in such countries as have been occupied by the enemies of Religion” to remember the requirements of defensive jihad and do “what is incumbent upon you, namely jihad against the enemies, giving them a rough time, establishing Islam, assisting the Religion and its adherents, raising Allah’s Word and subjugating unbelief and the unbelievers.”4

  Al-Sharif’s call was repeated by Islamic authorities worldwide, but nonetheless, the Italians did finally defeat the Ottomans and the Sanusis in October 1912. Al-Sharif did not give up. In 1914, he wrote to the Muslims in Libya: “How can you live with vipers and scorpions and with those who openly profess polytheism and the Trinity and who destroy the mihrabs [niches in the wall of a mosque showing the direction to Mecca for prayer]. How can the light of the sun of Islam shine over you when the Banner of the Cross and the Darkness flutters among you?”5

  The Sanusis never gave up, even defeating the Italians in battle in April 1915. They continued their jihad against the Italians for decades thereafter, and after World War II began to work with the United Nations toward Libyan independence. In 1951, the Sanusi leader Prince Muhammad Idris bin Muhammad al-Mahdi as-Sanusi became King Idris I of Libya; he was deposed in a coup by Muammar Gaddafi in 1969.

  The Ottoman Empire’s Death Throes

  The Ottoman Empire lost Bosnia to Austria-Hungary in 1908, parts of Greece to the independent Greek state and Rhodes to Italy in 1912, and Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace in 1913. By the time World War I began, the Ottoman domains in Europe that remained were the city of Edirne and the portion of East Thrace that surrounded it.

  During the war, the Ottomans joined the Central Powers against their archenemy Russia, along with Russia’s allies, Britain and France. The sultan Mehmet V declared that the war was a jihad, issuing a fatwa answering yes to this question:

  When it occurs that enemies attack the Islamic world, when it has been established that they seize and pillage Islamic countries and capture Moslem persons and when His Majesty the Padishah of Islam thereupon orders the jihad in the form of a general mobilization, has jihad then, according to the illustrious Koran verse: ‘March out light and heavy [hearted], and strive with goods and persons [in the way of Allah; that will be better for you’ (K[oran] 9:41)], become incumbent upon all Moslems in all parts of the world, be they young or old, on foot or mounted, to hasten to partake in the jihad with their goods and money?6

  He likewise answered yes to this question:

  Now that it has been established that Russia, England, France and the governments that support them and are allied to them, are hostile to the Islamic Caliphate, since their warships and armies attack the Seat of the Islamic Caliphate and the Imperial Dominions and strive (Allah forbid) for extinguishing and annihilating the exalted light of Islam [cf. Qur’an 9:32], is it, in this case, also incumbent upon all Muslims that are being ruled by these governments, to proclaim jihad against them and to actually attack them?7

  The Armenian Genocide Continues

  The Sultan’s call to jihad didn’t arouse much enthusiasm. However, the Ottoman public hadn’t lost its thirst for jihad altogether; it was just much more enthusiastic and willing to be roused to action by denunciations of the Armenians than by denunciations of the Russians, British, and French.

  As the Ottoman Empire was crumbling and there were calls for Armenian independence, the Ottoman authorities cracked down hard. In October 1915, Ismail Enver, the Ottoman minister of war, declared that he planned to “solve the Greek problem during the war…in the same way he believe[d] he solved the Armenian problem.”8 Rafet Bey, an Ottoman official, said in November 1916 that “we must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians…today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight.”9 The New York Times reported in 1915 that “both Armenians and Greeks, the two native Christian races of Turkey, are being systematically uprooted from their homes en masse and driven forth summarily to distant provinces, where they are scattered in small groups among Turkish Villages and given the choice between immediate acceptance of Islam or death by the sword
or starvation.”10

  The Ottoman interior minister, Mehmet Talat Pasha, explained to the ambassador from the United States, Henry Morgenthau, that one reason why the Armenian genocide was proceeding was because the Armenians had rebelled against the rule of the caliphate, thereby transgressing against the principle that Islam must dominate and not be dominated:

  We base our objections to the Armenians on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks. In the second place, they are determined to domineer over us and to establish a separate state. In the third place, they have openly encouraged our enemies. They have assisted the Russians in the Caucasus and our failure there is largely explained by their actions. We have therefore come to the irrevocable decision that we shall make them powerless before this war is ended.11

  Mehmet Talat Pasha also boasted to Morgenthau that the deed was already largely done:

  It is no use for you to argue…we have already disposed of three-quarters of the Armenians; there are none at all left in Bitlis, Van, and Erzeroum. The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don’t, they will plan their revenge.… We will not have Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.12

  The Times of London noted somewhat later that Assyrian Christians in what is now Iraq suffered at the hands of the Turks as well: “Telegrams from Mesopotamia state that some 47,000 refugees largely Nestorians, have come into the British lines after having got through the Turkish lines. Many of these are being taken to camps near Baghdad. A further 10,000 have been absorbed in the towns of Kurdistan or are wandering among the hills. These refugees have come from the Urumia region, which was isolated during the Turkish advance in North-West Persia.… The day after this escape the Turks entered Urumia and massacred 200 unresisting people—mostly old men—while 500 Christian women are reported to have been distributed between the Turkish troops and the Moslem inhabitants.”13

  The New York Times predicted that unless the Ottomans lost the war, there would “soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman Empire.”14 The Ottoman Empire did lose the war, but the de-Christianization continued, as the secular Turkish government considered a depoliticized Islam to be essential to the Turkish national identity, and continued to persecute and drive out the nation’s Christians, with the approval of Turkish Muslim clerics who still thought in terms of jihad.

  All in all, about a million and a half Armenians were killed in the Armenian Genocide, seven hundred thousand Greeks, and 275,000 Assyrians were killed in Ottoman territories under similar circumstances.15 Christian communities that had existed since the beginning of Christianity were wiped out. Constantinople, fifty percent Christian even in 1914, is today 99.99 percent Muslim.16 Further effacing the historical identity of the city, the secular Turkish government on March 28, 1930, officially changed the name of Constantinople to one of the names the Turks had used for centuries for the city but had never been official: Istanbul.17

  Adolf Hitler was impressed with the brutal efficiency of how the Turks answered their “Armenian question,” and used their example, and the world’s forgetfulness regarding this atrocity, to justify his own extermination of the Poles. In August 1939, he told Wehermacht commanders:

  Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter—with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me.

  I have issued the command—and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad—that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formations in readiness—for the present only in the East—with orders to send them to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space [Lebensraum] which we need. Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?18

  The same could be said of the victims of jihad throughout history. Who, after all, speaks of the victims of Tariq ibn Ziyad, or Mahmoud of Ghazni, or Mehmet the Conqueror, or Aurangzeb?

  The Demise of the Caliphate

  With the war lost, there was widespread discontent in the diminished Ottoman domains against the Islamic leadership that had led the once great empire down the road to disaster. One Turkish woman reflected the sentiments of many when she asked, “Of what use was the Caliphate to us during the war? We proclaimed a holy war and what good did that do?”19

  Kemal Ataturk, the founder of secular Turkey, agreed. The Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the sultanate on November 1, 1922, but seventeen days later chose the Ottoman crown prince, Abdulmecid II, to be the caliph—the first and only Ottoman caliph who was not to be sultan of the empire. Ataturk declared: “The Caliph has no power or position except as a nominal figurehead.”20 When the caliph dared to ask Ataturk for an increase in his pay, Ataturk told Abdulmecid: “The caliphate, your office, is no more than an historical relic. It has no justification for existence. It is a piece of impertinence that you should dare write to any of my secretaries.”21

  Finally, on March 3, 1924, Ataturk abolished the caliphate altogether and sent Abdulmecid into exile. The last caliph boarded the Orient Express, bound for Switzerland. As his train sped past Szigetvar in Hungary, where his illustrious predecessor Suleiman the Magnificent’s heart was buried after he died while on a jihad expedition, Abdulmecid said sadly: “My ancestor came with a horse and flags. Now I come as an exile.”22

  “Islam,” said Ataturk, “this theology of an immoral Arab, is a dead thing.”23 Islam wasn’t dead by any means, but the caliphate was, at least for the time being. Almost immediately, however, Muslims began working to bring it back. Initially, they were swimming against the stream. Ataturk’s Republic of Turkey, consciously based on Western, secular models of governance, was an initial success. Many of the states that were created by the British and French out of former Ottoman holdings adopted Arab nationalist secular governments that did not implement Sharia, such that as the twentieth century approached its midpoint, most Muslims did not live under Islamic law.

  For true believers, this was an intolerable affront to Allah, as well as the cause of the weakness of Muslims and of Islam itself. It could not be allowed to stand.

  II. SAUDI ARABIA

  One of the principal forces making sure that it would not stand, and that secular government would never gain a lasting foothold in Muslim countries, was the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

  Exiled to Kuwait by the rival al-Rashid clan in 1891, Saudi leader Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud returned in 1902, defeated the Rashidis, and seized Riyadh.24 Over the next few years, he gained control over more and more of Arabia, alarming the Ottomans, who were too weak to do much about it. In August 1906, Ibn Saud met with the Ottoman commander Sami Pasha, only to grow enraged when Sami Pasha would not relent on his insistence that the al-Qassim region of Arabia remain under Ottoman control. Ibn Saud shouted, “If you were not my guest, I should not spare your life,” and stormed out of the meeting.25 The Ottoman troops, meanwhile, were short on supplies and growing weary of the Arabian desert, which they called “Satan’s daughter.”26 In November 1906, they withdrew from the area.

  In 1914, the British and the Ottomans agreed to a partition of the Arabian Peninsula, with Ibn Saud nominally the viceroy of the Ottomans as the emir of Najd.27 When the Hashemite Hussein ibn Ali, the sharif of Mecca, rose up against the Ottomans in 1916 with the intention of forming an independent Arab state, the British—including Colonel T. E. Lawrence, who came to be known as Lawrence of Arabia—supported him. The British did not, however, support Hussein’s claim to be “King of the Arab Countries,” and did not fulfill the
promises they had made to him to support the independence of Arab lands.

  Ibn Saud didn’t like the “King of the Arab Countries” title either, and waged jihad against Hussein, eventually defeating him and driving him out of Arabia in 1924. After consolidating his control over the Arabian Peninsula, Ibn Saud proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on September 18, 1932.28 He decreed that all laws “should correspond to Allah’s Book, the Sunna of His Prophet (Allah’s blessing be upon Him) and the rules to which the Prophet’s Companions and the first pious generations adhered.”29

  The proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia took on geopolitical significance on March 4, 1938, when massive oil deposits were discovered inside the kingdom.30 Other discoveries followed, and within a few years the Saudis were exporting millions of barrels of oil every year. As the Saudi ruling class became more and more awash in luxury, it did not forget its Wahhabi roots. One of the chief exports of Saudi Arabia, particularly in the aftermath of the oil crisis of 1973, when unimaginable wealth flowed into Saudi coffers, was Wahhabi Islam.

  Between 1979 and 2017, the Saudis spent more than seventy billion dollars to finance the construction of mosques and madrasas all over the world, and on Wahhabi literature with which to fill them.31 One of the Wahhabis’ notable successes was in Kosovo. In the late 1990s, U.S. president Bill Clinton backed Muslims in Kosovo in their fight for independence against Serbia. Grateful Kosovars named a street in Pristina Bill Clinton Boulevard.32 But Kosovo’s pro-Americanism did not last long, courtesy of Saudi Arabia.

  Fatos Makolli, director of Kosovo’s counterterrorism police, recounted in 2016 what happened when Saudi Wahhabis started pouring millions of euros into Kosovo in 1999: “They promoted political Islam. They spent a lot of money to promote it through different programs mainly with young, vulnerable people, and they brought in a lot of Wahhabi and Salafi literature. They brought these people closer to radical political Islam, which resulted in their radicalization.… There is no evidence that any organization gave money directly to people to go to Syria. The issue is they supported thinkers who promote violence and jihad in the name of protecting Islam.”33